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Wednesday, December 31, 2014

#1248: Allen West

Allen West is a retired Lieutenant Colonel and the former Representative
from Florida’s 22nd district. West is a Teabagger, and is often mentioned by
other Teabaggers to deflect accusations of racism in the movement (West himself
claims that racism in the Tea Party movement is a conspiracy invented by
liberal media). He was elected in the Teabagger wave of 2010 but was defeated
in his 2012 reelection bid, perhaps partially because people realized he was
more or less clinically insane (though that should have been pretty damn
obvious the first time around as well).

His 2010 campaign went over well with certain segments of
wingnuts, however, and he did get the Sarah Palin stamp of approval early on.
Also, Glenn Beck praised West for his service in Iraq, which ended (Beck didn’t
mention) when West and his gang beat an Iraqi detainee senseless and used the information the detainee provided to arrest another, entirely
innocent person, whereupon West was found in violation of the Uniform Code of
Military Justice, relieved of his post, and fined $5,000.

Perhaps the most famous incident of his 2010 campaign occurred
when a reporter asked West about the IRS lien placed on him.
West responded by saying that the IRS document was “faked”, and that he could
document this. After he promptly failed to produce said documentation, he
invented the interesting logical fallacy of “appeal to security clearance” to try
to escape the “gotcha” questions, which consisted of claiming that he had an
even higher security clearing than the president,
therefore shut up. Christine O’Donnell also tried to invoke that one at one point,
by the way.

Otherwise, West’s campaigns seem primarily based on
relatively familiar stuff. For instance, House Democrats are communists.
Indeed, there are “between 78 and 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of
the communist party,
according to West, who failed to provide any references or indication of how he
arrived at the numbers (well, in one sense he indicated it pretty clearly).
He also diligently uncovered a “Soviet Union, Marxist-Socialist” meaning in the
Obama campaign’s “forward” slogan.
So there is plenty of conspiracy going on. Indeed, since West refuses to
believe that Obama could achieve anything, when e.g. statistics showed a drop
in unemployment rates, West was quick to dismiss it as a conspiracy:
“This is Orwellian to say the least and representative of Saul Alinsky tactics from the book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a must read for all who want to
know how the left strategize.” (No, he didn’t address the numbers themselves.) He
has also compared Food Stamps to slavery, and, with dizzying lack of self-awareness,
accused Obama of demagoguery – and for being a “disgusting racist” who “despises” white people.
An equally impressive degree of self-awareness can be found in his assertion that “the Left tries to win the women's vote by talking from the waist down” –
Democrats want the government to be the “sugar daddy” and replace men – while
Republicans seek to reach the hearts and minds of female voters. Meanwhile
Chuck Hagel is a “traitor” who dutifully serves “Barack Obama’s game plan to weaken the United States of
America” – Obama wants to weaken the US ostensibly because he only cares about
people on welfare (yeah, that’s the “reasoning”; such is the mind of Allen
West).

Then there is Benghazi. According to West, the media’s focus
on the Boko Haram group in Nigeria in Spring 2014 was part of the Obama administration’s efforts to draw focus away from Benghazi.
“Are we witnessing an Obama ‘Wag the Dog’ moment with Boko Haram in Nigeria? I
say yes,” said West.
When Ahmed Abu Khattala, the accused perpetrator of the Benghazi attack, was captured
just a few weeks later, West promptly tweeted that the capture was just a way for the Obama administration to distract from non-Benghazi scandals. In the meantime,
he had also claimed to have gotten the horrible “truth” about Benghazi from a random, unnamed
stranger seated next to him on a plane (Kent Hovind’s main source of scientific
“information”), but he didn’t tell us what it might be, only that it was really
shocking.

He also claimed that African American Democrats are trying
to keep African Americans “on the plantation,” while casting himself as the
“modern-day Harriet Tubman” ferrying them to rescue. In a critical summation of
West’s style, Mother Jones aptly concluded that for West “every sentence is a proxy war in the larger struggle between
patriots and the ‘people in this world that just have to have their butts
kicked.’” You can probably guess his reaction to a 2013 admission by the IRS
that it had particularly scrutinized tea party groups (a conspiracy spearheaded by Obama in person). It is, to put it mildly, not the only time West has endorsed whale.to-level conspiracy theories.

In 2012 he joined the Thomas More Law Center’s Citizens Advisory Board, because the group doesn’t know or care about how government works
either “knows the true threat to our nation posed by radical Islam and it
has initiated and funded more cases challenging the Stealth Jihad being waged
against our Nation than any other public interest law firm in America.”

Special mention should also be given West’s selection of
chief of staff in 2010, local wingnut talk radio host Joyce “if ballots don’t work, bullets will” Kaufman, who for instance advocated hanging illegal immigrants charged with
crimes and who apparently seems to think that automated phone recordings telling her
to press 2 for Spanish is the end of the world and America and Jesus. Shortly after
West was elected Kaufman resigned, allegedly due to the “liberal media’s ‘attacks’” on her and the “electronic lynching” she was receiving on the internet. West
accused the media of racism and sexism in their “attack” on Kaufman, defending her as a “brilliant political mind.”